Jack Chick comes to the big screen

Some of you may be familiar with the infamous Jack Chick tract Big Daddy?, in which a sweaty, arrogant atheist professor with a hideous combover is defeated by a young, earnest Christian student with a side part.

If so, then this trailer for the new movie God’s Not Dead will seem eerily familiar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMjo5f9eiX8

I saw the movie a few weekends ago, and I’ll post my thoughts in the comment section. Meanwhile, enjoy!

18 thoughts on “Jack Chick comes to the big screen

  1. Couldn’t they have made the professor a little more obnoxious and the protagonist a little cuter?

    I mean, those are my only bitches.

  2. I’m fascinated (and horrified) at the thought that there are several thousands of Americans (maybe tens or hundreds of thousands?) who sincerely believe that philosophy professors are anything at all like that.

    The truth is that any philosophy professor who behaved like “Professor Radisson” would not only be summarily fired, but would be completely unhireable at any institution of higher education in the United States.

    The fact that no one involved in this movie, nor its most avid fans, are cognizant of this basic institutional reality tells me a lot about how divorced they are from the reality-based community.

  3. Joe,

    You paid money to see that?

    It’s oppo research. 🙂

    Also, some things are so bad they’re good. This movie was a self-parody, like Battlefield Earth.

  4. walto,

    Couldn’t they have made the professor a little more obnoxious…

    They did. I’ll tell you about it later.

  5. I had a philosophy professor who announced near the beginning of the term, Whiteheads dictum:”…the function of reason is “promote the art of life,” which is a three-fold function of “(i) to live, (ii) to live well, (iii) to live better”

    The classes were structured as tutorials, and we were expected to discuss everything, so I jumped in and questioned whether everyone always wants to live better.

    The prof came down on me like a ton of bricks. I was a bit surprised, because in general the teachers allowed students to discuss among themselves. Also, he was a really big man, and coached wrestling on the side. He was in full competitive mode.

    What I learned from that was that some teachers cannot be questioned. I would hope they are outliers, but in my experience they are a significant minority.

    I had a similar experience writing a paper on Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man,” which I thought was bullshit.

  6. From the linked review:

    They initially write down that “God is dead” at Radisson’s behest not because they’re atheists but because they’ve been conditioned by our educational system to be spineless conformists who defer to authorities. They will write down whatever their professors want if that’s what will get them their grade and get them to where they want to be in life. This cynical indictment of American college students unfortunately has a grain of truth. Students can be shockingly intellectually lazy opportunists obsessed with grades and indifferent to thinking sometimes.

    Excuse me, but to the extent that this might be true, it’s not an indictment of the students. Lots of students accumulate fifty to a hundred thousand dollars of debt to go to college, and they are lazy cowards if they choose not to throw it away by challenging authority and taking lower grades?

    Not all teachers will lower your grade, but I’ve seen a few. And you have no real way of knowing in advance.

  7. I think everybody involved–the (cute & sweet) protagonist, the (evil) philosopher, the writers, the directors, EVERYBODY, needs to take an intro to logic or critical thinking class. The fallacy of begging the question occurs about 18 times in the trailer alone.

    “God wants us to have the freedom to choose whether we believe in Him or not.”

    Oy.

  8. keiths:
    Joe,

    It’s oppo research.

    Also, some things are so bad they’re good.This movie was a self-parody, like Battlefield Earth.

    My (freshman in college) daughter recently turned me on to a particularly awful thing called “Getting That Girl.” Hard to look away.

  9. They missed the comb-over completely. How authentic can this be?

  10. RB:

    They missed the comb-over completely. How authentic can this be?

    Artistic license.

  11. I found this review and recommend it quite highly. It looks at God’s Not Dead from a Catholic perspective, but also a pretty good reader of cultural-politics and aesthetics. To whet your appetite, the Epilogue:

    ————————————————————————–
    We live in the age of the undead God, the God who is merely not dead, but can hardly be called alive. This is a zombie Christianity. These are apologetics that risk nothing and grant even less in advance; this is love with conditions and straw men who burn with a zeal that shows them to be faking it, too. New Atheism, Bill Maher’s smart-assery, Contemporary Christian music, that privileged sort of suburban tie-dyed t-shirt wearing youth ministry*, and God’s Not Dead all belong together. They are obsessed with each other. And they all have things to sell.

    What was most real to me about God’s Not Dead was how fake it was, and how artificial a film it takes to portray the unwitting image of followers of Christ in America today. This may be an unfair image, but, making films (and retreats and conferences and music) like this, we damn well deserve it.

  12. I saw an interview with Kevin Sorbo on Bill O’Reilly’s show. He’d seemed to be quite a likeable character in Hercules and Andromeda. I hadn’t realized he was this slightly embittered Christian evangelical person. He was suggesting that Hollywood discriminated against him because of his religious beliefs, that offers of acting roles had largely dried up because of it.

    It seems to me that answer to this Christian victim mentality thing is to ask how many members of Congress and Federal and state public office holders are self-declared atheists. The answer to that question should tell you who is really oppressed and who is doing the oppressing.

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